tite of its readers with blow-by-blow accounts of John Beal Sneed’s windmill-tilting tactics with the Canadian immigration officials, the Fort Worth press carried an entirely different kind of story— different, but one that was equally fascinating to its subscribers. Colonel Boyce and his wife had come to Fort Worth to testify before the grand jury on behalf of Al. While in town they were interviewed by a

Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter. The story he filed was not nearly as humorous as the Winnipeg musings, but it certainly was a lot more inflammatory. Colonel Boyce was quoted as saying this: “Nobody will believe that my son abducted Lena Sneed . . . She is as sane as anybody . . . I know that they sent Mrs. Sneed to the sanitarium to get her away from my son . . . She planned the whole thing, and I am going to see that my son’s name is cleared of this false charge.”1

There are two distinct entities that concern themselves with parole in Texas—the Parole Division of the TDCJ and the Board of Pardons and Paroles. The first agency actually oversees inmates who have been released. Ex-cons report to them, and it is their staffers who visit homes and ensure that the provisions of parole (set by the Board) are actually met. The second is an independent agency whose primary role is the discretionary release of inmates from prison, along with revocation of released prisoners.

You may reach the Parole Division at:

TDCJ-ID Parole Division

8610 Shoal Creek Blvd.

P.O. Box 13401, Capitol Station

Austin, TX 78711

(512) 406-5200

FAX (512) 406-5858

The members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles are appointed by the governor to six-year terms, which are staggered so all do not expire at the same time. You may write or call the Board members, or the chairman, at the following addresses:

Over time, the Voting Rights Act has evolved into one of the most ambitious legislative efforts in the world to define the appropriate balance between the political representation of majorities and minorities in the design of democratic institutions.

RICHARD H. PILDES, PROFESSOR OFLAW, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

In January 2009 Barack Obama became the first black leader of the free world, winner of an election in which his race was clearly no barrier, and may well have been an advantage. He won a larger share of the white vote than the previous two nominees of his party, and turnout for African Americans ages eighteen to forty-four was higher than that for whites.1 President Obama’s victory was unmistakably the end of an era and the welcome beginning of a new one. Whatever one thinks of his politics, his stunning success is a historic turning point. Integration was the aim of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and much of the 1960s, and, by the ultimate test, American politics is now integrated. Blacks have been a major force in American politics for decades – and now they have reached its highest peak.

Another category of disclosures made by Snowden includes NSA activities concerning encryption of cyber communications and the use of software exploits against foreign intelligence targets. These activities raised concerns that the NSA was strengthening its signals intelligence mission at the expense of broader cyber security, a point made by Cate and Fidler elsewhere in this volume. This document is an excerpt from a classified description of Project BULLRUN, a secret effort through which the NSA worked to defeat encryption of cyber communications of foreign intelligence targets. Exposure of BULLRUN and related NSA decryption activities brought accusations that the NSA was engaged in a secret war against encryption, a key way to provide security for communications transiting the Internet.

The brilliant success of Newtonian mechanics and the great prestige of Descartes’s mechanistic worldview led to the gradual emergence of a rational, scientific frame of mind that eventually spread from science, through law, and into the new discipline of economics. This view embodied a critique of the communal life of most individuals—both the urban dwellers, with their guilds and corporations, and the peasants, who lived in village communities. Once bound by duties toward one another, their communities, and their shared environment, people now were defined by their individual property rights. Today, the legacy of the move toward modernity includes an unexamined faith in the concept of individual human rights and in a mechanistic, top-down rule of law, which opened the way for plunder and colonialism and a conception of corporations as “legal persons,” themselves the building blocks of an atomized system.

The 1701 Act of Settlement in England gave birth to the modern idea of the rule of law while also excluding the commons and the political forces that represented them. The Act also illustrated a conflict between medieval and modern conceptions of law and order. Capitalism, aimed at manufacturing, had its origins in privatization, colonization, and plunder. English history shows a systematic attempt to plunder resources in faraway countries, a process that began with the Crusades even before the enclosure movement originated at home. In other words, the taking (to use Locke’s term) has always had both a local and a colonial component.1

1. Edwards Aquifer Authority (EAA): www.edwardsaquifer.org. This is the website of the most influential groundwater district in the state. It is also an extensive site with access to everything the EAA is authorized to regulate.

2. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): www.epa.gov. This federal website includes extensive information about issues pertaining to water across the United States.

3. Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA): www.lcra.org. The website of the LCRA is full of good information about weather and river conditions.

4. River authorities: Use the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department site for links to all the river authorities in Texas: http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/landwater/water/habitats/rivers/authorities.phtml.

5. San Antonio Water System (SAWS): www.saws.org. The SAWS website has extensive information about San Antonio’s water supply system and also keeps up a fine internal site on the status of the Edwards Aquifer upon which San Antonio depends for its freshwater. SAWS is a water policy leader in the state and heavily influences water issues. Prudent researchers should place themselves on the mailing list to receive in advance the agendas of SAWS meetings.

Since October 1, 1849, when a horse thief became the first person to be held in the state’s custody instead of by local law enforcement, Huntsville has been synonymous with Texas prisons. The beautiful town of Huntsville—nestled in the midst of the state’s most lovely forests; four votes from being state capital instead of Austin; adopted home of General Sam Houston—is, nonetheless, by virtue of that first prison, fated to always be linked with prisons in the minds of Texans. That unit, built in what would soon be downtown Huntsville and known as the Walls, also soon included the growing system’s administrative offices. Over a century later, as the system began to expand rapidly, it became obvious that a separate unit was needed as a processing center. The Diagnostic Unit, built in 1964 a few thousand yards from the original Walls, became that intake unit. While there are now other units that may also serve some of the functions as the Diagnostic Unit, (now called the Byrd Unit), it was the first, it remains the most thorough, and it is the one I will use as a model.

In theory, Muslims and Jews in Yemen could not behave violently toward one another. In practice, violence across the hierarchical boundaries between Muslim and Jew seems to have been relatively common. Jewish sources provide contradictory answers to the question of whether Yemen under the imāms was a particularly violent place. Some credit Imām Yahyā with the virtual elimination

˙ of crime through his focus on law and order. Others (some of the same people) describe numerous violent robberies, particularly attacks by tribesmen on traveling Jewish salesmen in unsettled areas.¹ Such merchants, who were often unarmed, seem to have made easy prey. Jews in the process of emigrating were likely to carry all of their worldly belongings with them. Sālim Mansūrah tells

˙ the story of two Jewish men who, having packed all of their things upon a pair of donkeys and setting oﬀ on the journey for Israel, were assaulted and robbed by the shaykh of their small village and some of his male relatives, who were armed with hatchets. The two wounded men headed straight to Imām Ah mad’s

As people who live – in a broad sense – together, we cannot escape the thought that the terrible occurrences that we see around us are quintessentially our problems. They are our responsibility – whether or not they are also anyone else’s.

Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom

[The] need to face and understand our suffering, and to change toward new values, is perhaps the basic spiritual narrative – the common core of world spirituality.

Roger Gottlieb, Joining Hands: Politics and Religion Together for Social Change

Much of the literature on the relationship between social justice and spirituality focuses on how spirituality has informed and inspired social justice work. Relatively little attention is paid to how social justice might inform the practice and development of spirituality. These spheres, however, share a deep concern with suffering, which is a central concern and animating force of both. Social justice and spirituality are, moreover, in a recursive relationship, on which I focus here.

his topic was the birthing idea for this book. In January of 1993, my brother fell ill and my family was not only unsure how to contact me— they did not know the procedure to follow so that I might attend his funeral after he died. This hurt my family and myself deeply, that I could not be there to receive and give comfort. The Texas prison system places many conditions on this type of furlough, but it is allowed. But in such a situation, time is of the essence. If you want to get your relative out in time to see his dying mother, or to attend a memorial service for his daughter, then you must follow TDCJ guidelines, especially the guidelines that specify the people authorized to contact TDCJ with the details of a situation.

For TDCJ officials, this is an issue loaded with problems. Most state officials are sincerely sorry when tragedy befalls the family members of convicts and they do not want to seem heartless. However, security is a priority, and the system cannot allow just anyone to call and say, “John

here are perhaps only three ways an inmate may legally make money while he is in TDCJ. One is to write and then market his fiction, essays and poetry to free-world magazines. Another is to paint or draw and sell his artwork to interested buyers outside the walls. Both of these moneymaking ideas are subject to not just individual talent but to the mails, and to the hit-and-miss assistance of outside parties.

TDCJ offers one way for inmates who keep clear disciplinary records to make money while inside the walls, with all work and most sales being done by the inmates. It’s called the craft shop, or the “piddling” shop, and it is a privilege not to be dismissed lightly. The craft shop is just that: an area where inmates work on leather goods, jewelry, wood projects, paintings, fanciful stick creations—any of a number of personal expressions that can be done at a minimum of cost and then sold to officers or visitors or marketed to the free-world.

Inmates within the shops, called piddlers, usually begin as apprentices, or helpers, and work their way up the ladder as space in the craft shop allows. A determined, hard-working piddler who produces quality goods can make over $12,000 a year while still performing his assigned duties for the system. That may not sound like much money, but it does

The Washington Post disclosed this NSA slide obtained from Snowden in October 2013. It formed part of a briefing on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” through which the NSA accessed communications flowing between Google data centers located outside the United States. The Post story stated that the NSA did the same thing with Yahoo’s foreign communication links. This activity formed part of the MUSCULAR program. In PRISM, Google and Yahoo received FISC-approved orders to provide information to the NSA. The exposure of MUSCULAR angered Google, Yahoo, and other U.S. technology companies, worsening their deteriorating relationship with the NSA and damaging their global reputation for providing secure services.

In the MUSCULAR program, neither company was aware that the NSA was accessing its foreign-based communications facilities, which raised questions about the NSA’s authority to conduct this activity. The most likely source was the president’s constitutional authority to conduct foreign intelligence, as regulated by Executive Order 12333, initially adopted in 1981, and considered a less restrictive set of rules than FISA. A former State Department official published an op-ed in July 2014 arguing that U.S. government collection and retention of communications by U.S. persons under Executive Order 12333 violated the Fourth Amendment. In August 2014, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board decided to examine Executive Order 12333 for its implications for privacy and civil liberties, and the ACLU released documents in October 2014 on the executive order it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act as part of its effort to increase scrutiny of the order.

Because the medical care received in prison is such an important issue, this chapter is broken into two parts. The second, Appendix B, is taken word-for-word from the TDCD-ID Comprehensive Health Manual, and it outlines what services are available to Texas inmates. As you will see, they are impressive and are an enormously welcome improvement from the shockingly negligent system in place before Ruiz.

However, there is a huge gulf between what services are available and what services are actually provided. Many factors influence the quality of prison medicine, and the single biggest is the attitude I referred to in chapter one—the system cares little for inmates’ welfare except when it is possible that staff negligence may result in an inmate’s injury and death, and the system will then be held liable.

In this chapter I will again refer to Judge Justice’s March 1, 1999 order in Ruiz v. Johnson, 37 F. Supp 2d and 55 (S. D. Tex. 1999.) While Judge Justice did not find the medical practices unconstitutional, the testimony of expert and inmate witnesses, and the admissions of medical personnel and TDCJ officials, will help illustrate some of the problems I will point out.

While mobbing is a term recognized throughout the European Union, it has come to have a particular urgency and salience in Italy. Mapping the field of Italy’s dynamic political, social, and economic orders uncovers the historical conditions and tensions from which mobbing emerges. The discourse about mobbing reflects cultural apprehensions about the worst of global capitalism, reiterating its risks, effects, and human costs. The rapid replacement of Italy’s protectionist labor regime, once one of the world’s strongest, with neoliberal economic and social policies has played a significant role in shaping how workers might experience a sense of persecution and harassment at work. The social and economic history of stable work, as well as the speed with which neoliberalism has been implemented, has played a critical role in generating a set of moral orders in which the hasty removal of secure labor breeds fear, anxiety, and dread. Only in the context of Italy’s moral economy, in which protected labor has been seen as a right of citizenship, could precarious work be recognized as unethical and even health endangering.

when the momentum shifts to one of the teams. At that point it is crucial for the other team to reinvigorate, to shift strategies, to seize the initiative and stop that momentum before the game turns into a rout. So it is with most hotly contested jury trials. That crucial point in the Sneed murder trial came when McLean concluded his direct examination of John Beal Sneed. Beal’s virtuoso performance, enhanced by the tearful accompaniment of his two daughters, had been carefully orchestrated; it hit all the right notes at the right time to captivate the hearts and minds of the rural and unsophisticated jurors imbued with Victorian values. When McLean ended his direct examination and announced, “No further questions,” momentum was clearly with the defense. It was now or never for the prosecution.

It was also precisely at that point that an excellent opportunity was presented to the prosecution to turn the tide by attacking the